Ok, I have an idea of sorts, not involving the forums, per se. Just a few moments ago, I was searching through the Hardware Reviews looking for reviews on P55 motherboards and I wondered if it would be possible to just see a certain section on the main page, like part of a 'customization' thing, like what Yahoo and such do to their main page? You could have a + (plus) or - (minus) next to each section and just see what you wanted to see every day...Also, when searching back through the archives, maybe just be able to see certain sections instead of just having to search by word...

Am I making any sense? I'm not sure how else I could put it but hopefully I got the idea across...

=-Rigs-=

This comment was edited on Jan 14, 2010, 12:37.

'Who am I?...I am the right hand of vengeance and the boot that is going to kick your sorry ass all the way back to Earth, sweetheart! I am death incarnate, and the last living thing that you are EVER going to see. GOD sent me.'

theyarecomingforyou wrote on Jan 11, 2010, 15:38:Sorry, just saw it linked to at the bottom of the Popular Threads column and didn't pay attention to the separator. I just meant conventional forums rather than like the comments section; like one of the traditional pre-fab types like vBulletin - something that could be added as a separate entity. These forums just don't really strike me as being like... forums.

Look at the All Forums link from the masthead menu, that's a pretty traditional list of forums, but as Bucky observed, they're not very active (yet?). Sure they look a bit different from vBulletin, but basic functionality is the same and those big systems just have more bells and whistles.

We prefer these forums to be integrated with the rest of the board system, rather than a completely disjoint off-the-shelf forum system like phpBB et all. There are several reasons for that, an important technical one being that the entire site is built in Perl with Apache/mod_perl geared towards that, and I don't want to throw a PHP-wrench into the works.

So if you have any forum enhancement suggestions that haven't been mentioned earlier before in this thread, let's hear it; but a complete switch to another system is not an option.

Uhm, these are forums -- can you explain what you mean by "were to add forums"?

Sorry, just saw it linked to at the bottom of the Popular Threads column and didn't pay attention to the separator. I just meant conventional forums rather than like the comments section; like one of the traditional pre-fab types like vBulletin - something that could be added as a separate entity. These forums just don't really strike me as being like... forums.

It's also not really worth putting the effort in if a new and improved forum system doesn't see any usage. I see this as a way of testing the waters, and so far it's proven to be very quiet.

Uhm, these are forums -- can you explain what you mean by "were to add forums"?

Sorry, just saw it linked to at the bottom of the Popular Threads column and didn't pay attention to the separator. I just meant conventional forums rather than like the comments section; like one of the traditional pre-fab types like vBulletin - something that could be added as a separate entity. These forums just don't really strike me as being like... forums.

Allowing pictures would be a bad move, at least for the comments section, though if you were to add forums then they'd work well. Personally I'd like to see avatars for the comments, possibly with limited size images being allowed as well - with rules to prevent animated crap. Obviously any changes you make will annoy some people but I think that could improve the site.

I'm reluctant to add image support for the reasons mentioned in the preceding posts, but what if there also was a profile option to not include images, so that you can choose whether or not to view them. Would that work?

Ugh, please no. Every other forum I go to inevitably turns into a "LOOKIT ALL TEH L33T PICZ I FOUNT!!!!!1!" slideshow, which takes 287,000 minutes to load on my brutally inept internet connection...

Creston

It's the reason why I don't go to Shacknews or VE3D anymore. It's not that it take longer to load, but it makes it harder to read. Those other sites cater to gamers with ADD. Keep it simple and pure like it is now. No images!

I like the idea of other forums here, however the problem may be that many of the people in the community here only think to post to current news items.

Building on that and creating a discussion community that goes beyond that is a natural consideration. However, people only have so much time or energy to post and if they are already involved in other communities then it may be hard to get them to begin doing that here as well.

I don't think I'm getting my point across very clearly..but I think it may hold water.

I think that in order for these newer forums to take off someone will need to plant some seeds of discussion for them to take off.

An idea would be to have a user maintainable PC game collection database. Nothing fancy. Just a description of the game, year released, publisher, developer, etc. People can create there own lists and so on. I know there's sites like that already, but nothing that's really PC centric.

The PC Warrior wrote on Dec 29, 2009, 19:46:have you guys ever thought about just scrapping these forums and using an existing codebase?

Well, before I embarked on the current series of site improvements, we strongly considered porting the entire site to a CMS such as Drupal, but decided to stick with our custom Blammo/Chatbear/etc codebase, and build on that.

have you guys ever thought about just scrapping these forums and using an existing codebase? most of the suggestions are features present in other software, some of it open source and other commercial software. theres no reason you cant keep the same look with other software. even most open source forum/bbs software has ignore features, smilies and session/thread tracking. most also have tie ins to frontpage articles for commenting.

What about a thread display option that will show all of the comments in a threaded view instead of just one? That would be my default in an instant, and possibly keep the rambling conversations around here a bit more organized.

Most other forums only provide flatold view, with the most recent posts at the end of threads. Here at least you can also invert that. A threaded view with all posts expanded and properly indented will be difficult to combine with pagination. Currently threads, even with hundreds of posts like this, are shown on a single page but that becomes impractical when they are shown in full.

So I've put this on my to-investigate list, but don't know if and when it'll ever get done.

How about cleaning up the post interface? Should emoticons be above the login and not closer to the Special Codes section so somebody can see all text/mark up options in one general area?

The emoticons are clickable, and the More popup is full of smilies that can also be clicked to insert them into the post. So they're part of the input form, not of the info tables, and we think their place below the formatting buttons is just fine.

Should the "Forum Rules" be more prominent rather than being the lowest, most right-sided items? For that matter, do we need special codes listed as text and as a button?

The codes listing serves as info, a reminder of what they mean. The rules just fit nicely next to them, and the reminder in the comment field that can be clicked away is sufficient to point to them.

If I was new here, doesn't that blank button look a little strange?

I don't see any blank buttons. Maybe you mean the right-most button with the white 'Secret' text on it, but that's still readable to me. Besides, it being a bit faint to read adequately indicates its purpose.

Can I please put a character after an emoticon like I used to be able to?

No, I enforced spaces around them because too often combinations of : or ; and ) or D or P would inadvertedly get recognized as a smiley when the poster didn't mean to. And the spacing also makes the regexp substitution process cleaner.

In short, while we agree the post message form ain't pretty it is functional and logical, so we'll keep it that way for now. There are bigger fish to fry.

I have a couple of questions (please don't assume the topics I'm not asking about are being ignored, just that we don't need them clarified).

Do people have the ability to received e-mail updates?

Do you mean to get emails for when stories are posted?

How about a handful of always active threads/forums/folders not tied to a daily update? Have a coupon? Post it here. Have a tech question? Post it here. Why not integrate these "general" threads onto the main page?

That's not completely clear either... do you mean use the general forums for content that's linked from news stories, or find some way to include links to threads in the general forums on the front page, or something else entirely?